Monday, March 06, 2006

Sexy, This Hardware

I've got my own trophies, I don't need any Jon Stewart-based ceremonies to get me through the night. He was great, though—the man was good, too good. I rate his chances of being invited back to the Oscars about on par with Arrested Development actually making it on air again. You keep hoping, but you don't talk about it a lot, that might jinx things. And, speaking of last night, Three 6 Mafia? Jerseys in front of the mike, I don't know, but it's still good to see. "It might be new to you, but it's been like this for years".

In other news, Paddy Day is coming up fast, and normally I don't go for it—not wanting to appear like just another greenshirt storming Cobra-La—but I still plan on using the day as an excuse to buy something green. "Mushaboom" (click through the link) kills for Lacoste, btw, so does that mean I'm on board with a cool-by-association ticket? "It may be years until the day / My dreams will match up with my pay."

[Editing and sedition, early morning, March 7th—some stuff about books and Burroughs will follow, much later.]

"Locked Inside A Liquor Store" + Dash Rip Rock Oh, man, I almost posted a Lesbians On Ecstasy track here, but then I remembered that I wasn't a total moron. Sometimes, I forget. No, no, it's not the band name (although, yes, it is also the band's name), it's the junk-ass music that blows. BUT, speaking about band names, this here band's name renders any thumbs-up-or-down-nonsense pretty much superfluous. Obviously, this twenty-something-year-old band has good times. But what about le music? I wrote a poem five minutes ago, check it—

You don't suckAs much as you think you do.Rose are red, by the way,Unless they're blue.But I'm not talking about roses,I'm talking about you.

That poem almost doesn't suck, does it? There's a kind of I-don't know-what about the attitude that's agreeable, I think. If I let the robe drop, you might see the word INSOUCIANT shining brightly, like the sword Excalibur if Excalibur lost the "s" and became a mere word. The poem doesn't make sense, but that's another story. Now, Dash Rip Rock is putting out music that should suck, but it doesn't, because it's good. It's like some indie kid's version of mainstream rock, and it's all killer while being all filler, and that's okay. Good AM radio for the guy who likes good AM radio. I've got nothing more to say.

[Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday]

Pellucidar + Edgar Rice Burroughs There is no change or knowledge of time in this place, where the forested moon revolves with the earth and keeps eternally the same high spot above the same dark plot of land that is called the Land Of Awful Shadow—this in a world where the horizon curves up at the edges like a grim reptilian smile. The inner earth is full of faerie evolution, five-pound whales which nibble on scarlet lichen, gorilla-shaped men with the head of sheep, giant tigers and bears (oh, my!), and sea-serpents large than Ouroboros. Anyone could get lost in a world like this one. Anyone could get lost in a book about this world.

The Munsey pulp-fiction All-Story Cavalier Weekly first published Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar across five issues back in early 1915. Each issue cost ten cents and would cost, today, about a dollar eighty-four. That's a good price for fifteen-plus stories and some excellent cover-art. Burroughs had proved he was a saleable author with the phenomenal success of Tarzan and A Princess Of Mars, so when its time came, Pellucidar was republished in book form with the requisite J. Allen St. John cover and plates. Pellucidar has never really been out of print since, the last English-language publication of which I know being sometime in 2002/2003 under the imprint of the The University Of Nebraska Press. That's a solid pedigree for the first sequel in a third-string series by a pulp-fiction author from pre-WWI!

Now, there's little enough about the plot that is selling this novel. David Innes returns to the inner world of Pellucidar, hoping to find again the woman with whom he had fallen in love, Dian the Beautiful. He begins to map the country as he travels and runs, fortuitously, into his old friend Abner Perry. Together, they set out to track down Dian, not knowing she has been traded to the evil race of lizards which dominate the inner world. Adventures ensue by land and sea, the latter filled with even more terrible monsters than the shores and mountains of the land. Eventually, Dian is discovered, the man who had betrayed her is dispatched, and David Innes, Abner Perry and Dian the Beautiful live happily ever after in a wild kingdom by the sea. The end. But this story deserves to be read if only because it is still in print, and this without, mostly, the academic curriculum which keeps afloat hundreds of texts like Clarissa or To The Lighthouse or Martin Chuzzlewit. This story deserves to be read because it is suffused with a sense of the marvelous, because it raises expectations and meets them, because it is a treasure of justified spectacle. Such a treasure, such a wonderful parade, is, in the Burroughs universe, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing special. But for the receptive reader peering into this universe, what a pleasure it is, what a fine house of wonder, what a many-mansioned heaven can be had in the words of Edgar Rice Burroughs.